The 5th International Workshop on Papillomaviruses will be held 9/3 - 9/7, 1986 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This meeting has been selected to be the 5th of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Cell series. This is a specially designated conference held each year with the topics reflecting significant progress that has been made in a particular field of cancer research. This workshop will be dedicated to Richard Shope and Yohei Ito for their pioneering work on animal papillomaviruses. A book will be produced as an outgrowth of this conference. Our aim is to bring together a broad spectrum of scientists and clinicians working on the problems related to papillomavirus. The field of papillomavirus research has witnessed impressive advances in a relatively brief period. In large measure, these gains have been facilitated by the free exchange of materials and ideas that have taken place at each workshop. Problems of standardization of nomenclature and techniques have been effectively addressed at these forums. For example, at the first workshop, a standard method for typing and subtyping was agreed upon and two laboratories were selected as references and testing centers. Our 1986 workshop will continue to serve as a form for this exchange and for introducing the steady stream of new investigators into the field. A number of areas are likely to be of special interest: (1) new and rapid cytological methods for identifying specific papillomavirus types in large screening trials, (2) the results of prospective studies on neoplastic progression in genital lesions, (3) characterization of viral derived proteins in papillomavirus induced lesions, (4) elucidation of the functional control regions in the genomes of several of the papillomavirus types, (5) new findings on culture models for papillomavirus and (6) interim reports on ongoing therapeutic trials.